Grandpa Ham – Grandpa Can do IT!

Great article on #CMAS (aka #WEA) during #NEMO. Public Warning Works!!! nationaljournal.com/tech/the-super…

Beyonce at half time means I go to Latin baseball on ESPN2. Hope I remember to switch back for the 3rd qtr of the Superbowl.

1983 Marine Corps had under 200 gigabytes of DASD across 6 data centers. I bought 6 terabytes on Sat for $330. Crazy world.

Why you should attach security at the message level, not just use SSL.

I found the following today as a good explanation. It goes all the way back to 2005, but the metaphor still works. See: Naked Motorcycle Riding

• Diseconomies of scale in IT. 1 cause: disassociation of the correction of error conditions from those affected by the error. #
• Probably the greatest Geek Christmas comic ever written!!! http://xkcd.com/835/ #
• And do check out the mouse over added comment!!! Particularly if you have ever taken a data structures course. http://xkcd.com/835/ #

DM-OPEN in particular is designed to be a great enabler for NIEM and NIEM based messaging. DM-OPEN is based on the EDXL-Distribution Element (DE) which is a NIEM approved external standard for “packaging” content for distribution. The following link is to a recorded presentation from 19 August 2009 (last week) to the DM-OPEN Special Interest Group SIG. This recorded presentation is from a live demonstration of the use of DM-OPEN to transport NIEM IEPD defined content from an originator to a separate display application. It also shows how (when a NIEM IEPD also has the associated style sheet that is now part of NIEM IEPD requirements) that the NIEM content and is associated presentation can be shipped in the same message to recipients. The recording is 40 minutes long. The recording is a little rough in spots, but the content is both illustrative and thought provoking.
http://www.disasterhelp.gov/disastermanagement/library/archive/open/090819present.wmv

The new DM-OPEN (out this fall) will be even more useful as it will allow queries using NIEM compatible keyword and type structures within the DE’s ValueListURN structure (a categorization scheme for metadata about message content). This will make retrieval and re-distribution of NIEM Content more practical and more efficient for DM-OPEN participant applications.

Interesting phenomena.  I put out a tweet likening the NIEM Naming and Design Rules Document to a cross between Leviticus and IRS regulations.  Almost immediately, I was followed by 1) a Bible Study Group asking for money 2) a NIEM consultant, and 3) a Tax Consultant.  Apparently they each have some sort of bot in place that looks for key words. They then follow in tthe hope of being followed.  It worked for the NIEM consultant, not the others. Shortly thereafter, I was folowed by ithe IJIS Institute, a justice related non-profit with a strong interest in NIEM.  I now follow them as well.

It is always nice to know that you web services are up and running strong.  Since Twitter is the current rage, I though I would see if it could actually be useful. I set up a new Twitter account, wrote a poller to DM-OPEN that pings it on a regular basis and sends me a direct message to my grandpaham Twitter account upon the first instance of a successful ping,  the first instance of a failure following a series of successful pings, and the first instance of a successful ping after one or more failures.  Failures do not happen often, but now I will be the first to know if they do. Cool.

Nothing special about this post except that it is being done from 36,000 feet in a Virgin America Flight from Dulles to San Francisco.  Ain’t Technology great?

If your really think about it, the world has not changed a whole lot since 1964.   Here is how I thought about it back then: The Caves